GoPro Had a Terrible Quarter and Will Delay Releasing Its Drone Until Winter

On Friday, GoPro released its figures for the first quarter of 2016, and they show that the company had a rough start to the year. As a result, the company has also announced that a delay in releasing its Drone, the Karma, until this winter.

GoPro has been having a tough time financially since last winter: its stock price and revenue has dropped in light of competition and declining sales, and earlier this year, the company had to cut down its product line. That cutback seems to have also extended to its yet-to-be-released drone, the Karma. In this week’s earnings report, the company announced that it would be pushing its release back to Winter 2016: “And while we had to make the difficult decision to delay our drone, Karma, the upside is that Karma’s launch should now benefit from [Christmas].”

If it can make it that far: GoPro announced a loss in revenue (down 49.5 percent from the same quarter last year), driven by lower than anticipated sales, coupled with the costs associated with discontinuing several brands. The company’s stock price dropped 7 per cent to $9.81/£6.82 a share on Friday, and is down an overall 44 per cent this year.

Moving the Karma to the winter season makes some amount of sense for the company. Drones have increasingly been a popular Christmas purchase, and it’s clear that GoPro hopes to make up for losses later this year. Still, the shaky financial situation, coupled with the product delay, means that the company will need to wait for another five to six months before generating any income from what it appears to be hoping will be a life-saving product.